Sailing Wondertime Rotating Header Image

learning

99.9% Lucky

Feb 17th, 2014
by Sara.
15 comments

Girls in paradise

Recently, I’ve seen a few cruising-related internet memes something along the lines of this: “It’s not luck, that I’m out sailing my yacht around in paradise. It’s 100% pure hard work.” This kind of rubs me the wrong way and I can’t stop thinking about it.

I mean, it is sort of true really: we could just be armchair sailors reading sea stories by the fireplace wondering what it’s really like out there. We could be living in a comfy cozy house with all our loved ones an hour or three drive or flight away, wondering what it would be like to be on the other side of the world, never having made the sacrifices to actually get here. It does take a whole shitload of work to set sail; read some of my entries from June 2011 for a trip down crazy-stress-but-in-a-very-good-kind-of-way memory lane. We sold everything, spent everything, we’ve sacrificed time with beloved family members and friends back “home.” But we had to do it. There just wasn’t any other option for us.

So, I understand the hard work part. But before we could even make the “hey, let’s go cruising” decision a whole lot of other stuff happened. I can’t see how I can attribute them to anything but “luck.”

First of all, we were born in the United States of America to average middle-class families. We weren’t born in Tonga, where the average worker earns about $25 USD per day. Or Mexico, where the average monthly wage is under USD$1000/month and typically far less. Very very few people in either place own yachts. You are very lucky if your family owns a small skiff. Not everyone in the U.S. is as lucky as us of course: an obscene amount of the American population are homeless and/or lives in poverty.

Michael and I were each born to parents that were university educated and had well-paying jobs. They taught us the love of reading at very early ages, encouraged us to do our best and study hard both in and out of school. We were expected to continue learning after high school graduation. Most of all, we were encouraged to follow our dreams and made to believe that we could do anything we wanted. Our parents taught us that the world was our oyster. Not everyone is so lucky to be born into supportive families like ours.

Michael was lucky that his parents took him cruising at 13 and sparked a dream to cruise with his own family.

I was lucky to log on to webpersonals.com in 1998 and spark up an “instant” message conversation with an interesting boy, which led to lunch at Dad Watsons in Fremont and 14 years of marriage.

It was our good fortune to land jobs in the IT field as the Seattle tech boom was exploding. This allowed us to buy our first yacht before either of us were 25.

We were lucky to be blessed with two perfectly healthy and delightful daughters.

I am lucky to still have my good health, despite almost 28 years of T1 diabetes.

We were lucky to sell our house in a downward-trending market. We’d put a lot of elbow grease into the property over the three years it was ours and were able to land enough profit to pay for a floating home and a trip across the Pacific.

In New Zealand, we feel outrageously lucky to be residents here now. We are friends with a family from Pakistan. Their daughter is the same age as Holly. They arrived here within days of us. The dad works with Michael at his IT company. It took them six years for New Zealand to approve their application for residency, the same process that took us six months. It’s hard to feel lucky, though, at something so unfair.

Things continue to happen, at a rather alarming pace, that are hurling us towards things that we’d envisioned but are now becoming real. It’s clear that we are exactly where we need to be. Maybe “luck” is not really the right word, but “fate.” Whichever it is, I am 100% grateful for all that the universe has given us, which is allowing us the chance to work to make our dreams real.

Bliss

Back to School

Feb 10th, 2014
by Sara.
3 comments

First Day of School

While it seems like summer is finally getting underway here, it’s already back-to-school time. Yesterday, both girls started their new classes at their Auckland primary school. It was Holly’s first full-day of school, ever.

I was so looking forward to it. All of us were. We were all a bit tired of bumping into each other on the boat and looking forward to this week, when we could each head out into the city on our own to learn and explore. I was anxious to get started on writing down some of the stories that have been bouncing inside my head. Both girls were excited to see the friends we hadn’t been able to see over break again.

Today, after dropping them off at their new classrooms for the second morning in a row I came back to our empty, silent boat. I made myself a latte and sat down, the whole settee to myself. And felt the unease that had been looming settle in.

Yesterday after school I tried to coax the girls into telling me how their first day back at school was. “Oh, it was good,” Holly answered. “Fine,” was Leah’s response. They both had had fun at recess and were glad to be able to play together this year. After a little downtime with a snack and an audiobook, the girls threw on some ratty shorts and t-shirts. They grabbed their life jackets and jumped down to the dock and peered down into the water, their small fishing net poised to snatch any unsuspecting fishes that would soon swim by. I had dinner on the table before I was able to coax them back on the boat, each girl talking at such a rapid pace I could barely follow them: they’d seen tiny jellyfish with bright red middles, spent some time scraping invasive fanworms off the dock, caught some more shrimp, were certain they’d seen a nudibranch (“but it was dead”).

The memory of this wants to break me apart today.

Day 1 agenda

Year 1, day 1 agenda

I remember all that we experienced over the school break: hiking out at Great Barrier, Leah’s fascination with carnivorous plants (resulting in a pile of books from the library and our very own Venus Fly Trap that we miraculously haven’t killed yet), afternoons at the swimming pool, Holly singing along to friends jamming on ukeleles late into the summer’s night. It seems cruel to stuff them into these classrooms that seem boring even to me: a few books on a shelf, a couple buckets of blocks, a table of computers and some ipads stuck in the corner. Teachers that seem rushed and busy and overwhelmed, already. The days of dressups, sand boxes, fingerpaints at school gone for good. I can’t help but wonder: what are they actually learning? How to get along with others? How to sit quietly and wait your turn? How to sit in your cubicle and get your work done as told? The cynic in me sees what the end goal really is.

Leah’s hope for school this year is that there is more science this year than last. In my heart I know she’s got years before they move on to the type of knowledge she regularly seeks out on her own, before they move on from the basics of reading, writing, and maths. I just tell her, “I hope so too. But we can learn about science on our own too.”

At the age of 8, I watch Leah invent projects for herself, get interested in subjects and want to research them to death. There’s a pile of notebooks in her bed that is filling with notes and drawings. She plans outings for us, museums she wants to go visit. She asks for certain books from the library and spends hours reading in bed to herself. Maybe this is all that learning is about. After years of feeling overwhelmed by the idea of homeschooling, I think I finally understand that my main job would be to just get out of the way.

Then again, it’s been eight looooong years since I’ve had this many hours all to myself so maybe it’s just something to get used to. It’s always difficult sending your last baby off to school. But now I’m writing this at 1 in the afternoon, not at 11 pm. The girls’ primary has allowed us to immerse ourselves in the community and culture here in ways that keeping them to myself wouldn’t. Everything comes with frustration, at some level. We’ll settle in. And then it will be time again for something new.

Boatschool Kindergarten

Oct 5th, 2011
by Sara.
4 comments

When we landed in Sausalito last month after our trip down the coast and I logged onto Facebook for the first time in many days I was bombarded with all the adorable photos of our friends’ children’s first days of school. It hit me that Leah was officially a kindergartener herself and I should probably get busy with a little schooling. I felt a little sad that I won’t ever be dressing Leah up in her new kindergarten outfit and sending her off to her first day of school with tears in my eyes. Although she doesn’t know how to put it in words, I think Leah knows she is missing out on some things too and remembers all the good times she had at our wonderful Coop preschool in Olympia. When I mention school at all, she crosses her arms and closes her eyes, her way of saying she just doesn’t want to talk about it. But the other day, I overheard her telling another adult proudly “I am homeschooled!” when she was asked about where she went to school. With a field trip just about every day, I think she sees the countless advantages of our boatschool kindergarten too.

A little geography and oceanography at the (free!) San Francisco Bay Model in Sausalito

Experiencing other cultures (Dim Sum in Chinatown)

Art appreciation in Sausalito

Marine biology at Monterey Bay Aquarium

Seatwork aboard

Recess, Santa Cruz style

A Visitor From the Deep

Oct 16th, 2010
by Sara.
Comments are off for this post

“Mom! Mom! Dad! Dad! Come quick! Hurry! Hurry!” We heard Leah exclaim from outside the boat on the dock where she had been laying quietly watching the water. She was squealing with excitement. “You have GOT to see this! Something is swimming under the boat with many legs!”

Now we were intrigued. We had got to see this.

We stepped onto the dock and peered under the boat. And indeed we saw the beautiful creature too, a translucent sea animal swimming, no, undulating peacefully through the murky marina water. It had countless soft spines, each with a dark brown tip that looked a little ominous. “Get the bucket!” our budding biologist commanded and Michael grabbed the white bucket that has now held many a sea creature. He gently scooped up the 6″ long animal with some sea water and set the bucket on the dock for all to view.

“What is it??” Leah asked us. We were certainly stumped. While we’ve had hundreds of jellyfish swim past our boat, thousands of teeny, tiny fish and there’s a handful of healthy sea anemones on our pier this fascinating animal was a mystery. It definitely seemed out of place and we wondered how it had gotten stuck in our marina.

We grabbed our Audubon Field Guide to North American Seashore Creatures and identified it as some type of nudibranch. None of the species in our book seemed to match, but a quick check on Google (oh how we are going to miss the internet when we are cruising!) identified it as a Giant Nudibranch. It turns out that these are quite a sight to see while diving in Puget Sound, especially if you get to view one feeding on an anemone; we felt very fortunate to get to watch one from our nice dry dock.

Leah just had to share her new discovery so she ran a few boats down and told the girls from Pearl what she had found. They were intrigued and came over for a look and were fascinated too. Turns out it was their first marina nudibranch sighting as well.

For a number of minutes the creature did not move at all, clearly terrified. You know, that playing dead trick. Then it must have realized it was not actually dead yet and started to swim around our bucket. We observed our unique visitor for another 10 minutes then gently set the creature back into the sea where it quickly undulated away. Leah was tearful but it was yet another chance for us to explain how we can look at the sea creatures we find for a short time but, no, they are not going to become our pets. They must be returned back to their home, the sea. She understood and was grateful, as were we, for the chance to have this beautiful creature visit us for a while.

Which just goes to show that if you lay on your stomach on the dock peering in to the depths of the sea for long enough you never know what will come swimming by.